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A review by meetmeinmalkovich
In the Vanishers' Palace by Aliette de Bodard
2.0
Where to start?
This was a short, Viêt-inspired retelling of Beauty and the Beast. So I immediately had an idea of where this story was going and…it went there. I expected some Stockholm Syndrome just like it’s inspiration, but even for a short book, the attraction between Yên and Vu Côn is not slow-building. Yên was betrayed by her village, so I can imagine her feelings towards them are apathetic ones, but she almost immediately endeared herself to her captor.
de Bodard has a gift for repetition, which is a trigger for me in real life let alone in literature. Her prose frequently describes how unruly and unbending her characters are but we don’t actually see this happening so it’s a lot of telling vs showing, and I think these two points is where the book lost me unfortunately.
This was a short, Viêt-inspired retelling of Beauty and the Beast. So I immediately had an idea of where this story was going and…it went there. I expected some Stockholm Syndrome just like it’s inspiration, but even for a short book, the attraction between Yên and Vu Côn is not slow-building. Yên was betrayed by her village, so I can imagine her feelings towards them are apathetic ones, but she almost immediately endeared herself to her captor.
de Bodard has a gift for repetition, which is a trigger for me in real life let alone in literature. Her prose frequently describes how unruly and unbending her characters are but we don’t actually see this happening so it’s a lot of telling vs showing, and I think these two points is where the book lost me unfortunately.